There was a time when men played football by running the ball between the tackles, and life was good.

Bill Walsh figured out that if he could teach his team to complete a 1 yard hitch to a Wide Receiver with a 67% success rate, the results would be as good as a run and he could therefore be more unpredictable on offense.

Bill Walsh's West Coast offense goes on to be bastardized by small schools into the Run and Shoot and later the Spread. Steve Spurrier becomes the biggest bastard who decides that a big team with big talent can use spread principles and as many offensive snaps as possible to maximize their talent gap.

Lou Holtz, like Skywalker, defeats the forces of evil by chomping Spurrier in the Sugar Bowl. This moment should have been the death knell for the G-A-S offense.

But then that darn Bill Walsh defeats one of Lou Holtz's best teams 9 months later 33-16 in South Bend. Now, Notre dame must compete against Stanford for smart football players, and the decline would start some 18 months or so after that game.

Bill Walsh changed the course of football forever, and I would say for evil.

Paul Brown and Al Davis also. To be fair to your point, Davis got most of what he knew from Gilman. But Walsh didn't devise the basis of the offense he became famous for until the Bengals acquired Virgil Carter.

get the Bengals HC job when Brown retired. I just assumed he picked up a few things from the guy after working for him for 10 years and considering the high regard in which Brown is held among the pantheon of coaches, including by Ara.

and the passing tree builds off of that play. That is a Gilman principle that has been adapted by many others, notably Walsh. The west coast offense really takes advantage of routes in the middle of the field.

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